Fastidious Floral Fairytale Fireplace

I got a little sidetracked and engrossed on something which was completely unplanned for the fairytale treehouse, and it took all week. Surprise! Surprise! 😜

I had intended to work on getting the balcony assembly installed. In fact, I earnestly started that goal by attaching the flowering vines to the balcony posts. 

Repainted vines from last post.

Flower vines wired to balcony before filler flowers were added.

I even filled in empty areas with supplemental mulberry roses and buds. All was going well...

After mulberry roses filled in.

Until I put it in place for a dry fit. Then I began to ponder whether I needed more vines adorning the panels or if there was enough going on on the posts. What about the structural beams holding the balcony up from the first floor? Maybe just green vines there? Yeah, but despite it being two weeks since I ordered them from the Etsy shop, they hadn't even shipped yet. So, I put that decision aside and carried on with the dry fit instead. 

Dry fit with wall and floor/ceiling to decide placement of fireplace.

I had questions about how the girls' fireplace wall would tie in to the balcony. I had always intended to have a railed portion so that you could look down into the great room, but on which side? The balcony or the back of the treehouse? The wall, being a couple inches short, would need to slide one way or the other. In order to know for sure, I had to look at the actual wall, floor and ceiling in place - not just imagine it. Once I saw it in place, my ideas for the fireplace began to bombard my brain. From past experience I know to seize this kind of creative momentum, lest my ideas float right on out into the nethersphere, never to return. So, the balcony got put aside once again until my vine order and solid ideas for it are at hand.

As per my M.O., I designed the structural pieces of the fireplace in Design Space and cut them with the Cricut Maker. Straight cuts? Cheap chipboard? Yes, please! I covered the kit's wall with scrap paper leftover from the girl's cubbies. Because the kit wall is only 1/8" thick, to give a more realistic chimney feeling, I also made a chimney breast, covering it with another scrap. The fireplace itself has a top, a hearth, a back, double layered front, and sides. To the inside, I added egg carton bricks in a herringbone pattern, just for fun. To detail the fireplace, I had a few packs of resin column fronts with an artichoke frieze. They were the perfect size to flank the firebox. Dresden appliques adorn the front, edges and sides.

While the fireplace assembly was drying, I worked on the fire basket. I made a log holder with firedogs out of kraft card. 

No need to point out anything salacious about the firedogs. Believe me - Russ already has. 🙄 

Resizing things down to 1/12th scale doesn't always translate well.

Double layer firedogs, log basket, bracing.

Layers glued to create thickness and detail.

Bent, assembled and painted.

It's always a perfect fit when you make it custom, lol!

For the fire, I placed a half water bottle cap (it's translucent so the light comes through) under the fire basket/log holder and placed a red LED chip light inside. Like the Log Fire With Glowing Embers tutorial, I surrounded it with glowing "ash". I used hot glue to make Sharpie colored orange/yellow translucent flames to go between the wood logs, but it didn't work out as swell as I'd hoped. I need more practice and patience. At least one of the glue strips worked as intended - it almost appears to be flames due to the other three chip lights under the logs.

At this stage I had the fireplace assembled to the wall, toned down with washes, aged with washes, added trims, put the fire logs in place, added sconces and of course - installed a mirror. But it still wasn't nearly finished yet!

It had to be adorned with flowers. A swag above the mirror, a swag on the mantle and then a vase with buds just popping. The carousel horse is pot metal painted with gold to tie in the mirror frame. Accessories will likely evolve later as I switch my concentration from structure to accessories.

Testing the lights.

With the room lights off.

And at the same time, there were also flower vine valences created for the girls' cubby windows. Fairytales are full of flowers, especially fairytale treehouses!

Alice's Bed Cubby

Goldie's Bed Cubby

But fireplaces need other things, too. Not just pretty things, but useful things. I wanted to make a fireplace screen for the girls and I was fairly certain I could find something to make them from this hoard of mine. Sure enough, I had a set of six half scale chipboard gothic windows from Alpha Stamps. 

I applied Fast Grab Tacky Glue neatly to the back of three of the windows, then placed them on top of some very thin acetate from Cricut Chipboard packaging. Once set, I carefully cut around the edges. Then, to solidify the panes, I filled in the windows with Crystal Clear Gallery Glass.

Once the Gallery Glass was clear and dry, I glued the other three windows on, sandwiching the acetate between them. Then I wrapped them in 1/8" kraft card strips to smooth out the edges.

I painted the frames with a Krylon Gold Leafing Pen, then filled the other side of the glass with more Gallery Glass.

I added some purple and green polka dots with the Sakura Glaze Pens. To attach the window panels together at the correct angle (so they'd fit on the hearth), I sliced 1/8" quarter round in half, making it 45 degrees instead of 90 degrees. Then I glued each half to either side of the center window. When that was dry, I attached each side window. Sorry Betsy - hinges and chipboard do not good bedfellows make. 😊

I also painted a set of fireplace tools and added a basket of logs. The fireplace wall is ready now to help me make my railing side decision.

And it is ready to install into the girl's room.

After flooring, of course!

Unfortunately, my real life house could really use some fastidious focusing. See ya in a couple weeks!

xo xo,

Jodi

P.S.A. On Blogger Issues:

Sometime in mid 2022 the comments I leave for others on their blog posts were mysteriously disappearing, even days after they had been posted - I saw them post! After many searches, I finally found a thread that confirms that I am not (crazy) the only one this is happening to, and a reason for the mystery. Apparently, if your comment disappears from someone's blog, it has to do with their spam filter within the Comments section of their blog. So, it is ultimately up to the blog owner to resolve - nothing you can do.

If you receive comments saying this is happening on your blog, go to your blog dashboard and click on the Comments page. You may see the comment there which has been spontaneously marked as "Spam" for unknown reasons. You can manually approve the comment.

If you don't see the comment, click the question mark symbol at the top right of the page to tell Blogger about the problem. Apparently, they will reset your spam filter which eliminates the problem, at least for a while.

Some others have reported the cause as security settings on specific browsers or a need to clear your cache. Because I have also been unable to backup my blog content since last summer (stalls out and does not save), as well, I suspect that as things are broken in Blogger, they are just no longer being repaired. I hope it is not the case, but I recommend you look into Google Takeout to protect your work. I have mine scheduled to automatically export quarterly and they send my backup files to my email. If ever Blogger ends or starts to charge for hosting, at least we'll have our archives to decide what to do with them.

Call Me Impulsive...

As I was starting the Fairytale Treehouse's kitchen, I kept thinking about Goldie and her dream to create a porridge cookbook. I knew she would need ample space to experiment as well as 'top of the line' appliances. That is, top of the line for the era that she is living in! Suddenly, I had the whole room envisioned in my mind, and the impulse to start on her oven. Sometimes, the order I do things isn't logical. But inspiration can be fickle, so I've learned to follow it whenever it comes.

Goldie's Oven

Last week I shared a couple photos of how I began - with the first floor's dividing wall. I drew out my dimensions and then began to create the structure pieces for the oven in Design Space. I truly wasn't sure it was going to work on the first try, but the best way for me to learn is to see a thing in three dimensions to understand it. I got really lucky and the first pieces I cut worked just the way I hoped they would!

Linfield kit's first floor dividing wall.

Oven components in Design Space. Purple are the upper portion of the structure, blue the lower portion and black are the base pieces and inner structural pieces that needed to be cut on another sheet of chipboard.

After I cut the parts from chipboard with the Maker, I assembled and painted them. I attached the base to the Linfield kit's dividing wall, then added 1/4" channel molding to finish off the wall's edges.

One of the things I have been looking forward to most with this project is the opportunity to use lots of texture - by whatever materials I have available to me or by using any craft supply I can think of trying. For the dividing wall, I'd have bricks showing through Paperclay stucco. I'd clad the oven in a combination of stone and egg carton bricks. The base floor was another fun chance to try Paperclay, this time in the form of river rock.

For the wall's brick and oven's stone cladding, I used Magic Masonry - it's the sticker roll stuff  that you apply to the surface, spread stucco (or in my case joint compound) on top and then remove the tape. You are effectively removing the grout lines when you remove the tape, leaving behind the masonry. To add a little texture, I let the joint compound set up for a few minutes to become more firm, then I lightly pounced it with a paper towel.

Areas of Magic Brick, and the stove top framed in egg
 carton brick left over from another project.

Magic Stone applied to the top of the oven hood, more
 egg carton bricks applied to various areas.

In between the assorted masonry applications, I was also working on the oven door. I needed to figure out a way to make it functional, and because it is made of chipboard and not wood, I decided to make paper hinges with a toothpick as the pin. 

Three layers of the door: Frame overlay, oven front
 with opening and arched double layer door.

Frame overlay with egg carton bricks applied.

Cardstock paper hinges made by wrapping thicker card several times
around a toothpick then securing with Tacky Glue.

Oven door assembly. Two paper hinges are attached to the door and sandwiched under the smaller inner door arch piece. Two are attached to the oven front and then wrapped around to the inside of the oven front where it is secured with lots of strong glue. Then a toothpick is inserted through all four hinges to allow the door to swing open and shut. Beads have been added to the top and bottom of the toothpick for decoration as well as to keep the toothpick from coming out of the hinges. Dresden appliques have been added to the door, and a silver brad is the door handle.

The black acrylic paint looks really close to cast iron after rubbing it down with your finger. Dulled by dead skin cells, maybe? Eeeewwww!

Testing the function - it works! The little door will attach to the
side of the oven in order to feed logs into the fire.

As the finicky glued parts of the oven door were setting, I starting painting the individual bricks and rocks. The look I am after is muted and ethereal, achieved by many whitewashes, but the initial colors are bold. You might notice that I have added 1/4" x 1/4" timbers and brace pieces to the walls to lend to the Tudor illusion.

Colors taken from the color chart for this project.

Wow! Saturday morning cartoon colors!

Muted after a bit of whitewashing.

Time to apply the paperclay stucco! I like my results with the stove wall much more than I do the bedroom and kitchen walls. Practice really does make perfect (or close enough)!

Now it was time to stone the base. I brushed wood glue onto a small area at a time, then rolled up random sized Paperclay balls to squish onto the floor. I found that if the Paperclay cracked while I was forming it around the edge, a little water, rubbed on by my finger, repaired the crack. My stones were a bit thick, so it took overnight for them to dry.

The next morning, I was able to sand the stones to flatten them a bit (more even surface to stand on while cooking) and then paint my individual stones. When they dried, I sealed them with Mod Podge in preparation for the grouting process.

I used my fingers to apply joint compound into the cracks. Because the cracks were so deep, I did a second application once the first had dried. I found it was much easier to remove the joint compound from the stones without damaging them than it is to remove spackle. There must be some added stabilizer in spackle that makes it harder to remove. From now on, I will only use joint compound for grout of all kinds.

You might have noticed that I also added a mantle/shelf thing using cove molding and 1/16" x 1/2" basswood. I can't resist an opportunity to add a surface for displaying minis later on!

Shelf and joint compound finished.

Left profile.

Time to add years of use to the floor! Hey, I know it's a new treehouse, but patina is charming! I made a slurry of wash with brown, gray and khaki acrylic paint and an abundance of water. I applied about three coats and dabbed up any "overdos" with a paper towel. In between coats, I also aged the stucco and brick around the edges with a khaki wash.

My LED workroom lights are glaring, but the end photos with 
ambiance lighting gives the romantic fairytale look I am seeking!

Finally, it was time to figure out how to make a fire to heat the oven. I have been falling asleep with the intention of coming up with something realistic looking for days. Luckily, my first set of ideas worked like I'd hoped. I love the results!

I made a LED Log Fire With Glowing Embers tutorial and listed it on the Tutorials jump-off page, too.

At last, I could install the oven door and see the completed vision!

I am so amazed that the oven wall came out so close to how I had envisioned it in my mind, and that it evokes exactly the vibe I am trying to create for this project! Goldie is thrilled to be able to start on her cookbook dream, and I am reminded that it is always best to let inspiration lead you when it comes to miniatures.

Follow your impulses, my friends. You may just discover your untapped creativity!

xo xo,

Jodi